Auburn Top Fives, Courses

So I'm done. I don't have my diploma, but I have taken all my finals, turned in all my papers, and am in the process of saying those dreadful goodbyes. This past few weeks have turned into a time of reflection on the past four years, and what better place to opine about my Auburn experience than my fine, oft-visited blog?

Unlike other Top Fives, the following Top Five Courses won't be listed in order of most important to least, but rest assured, if it's on this list, you should take the course or mourn it for not being around.

1. Public Speaking, with Laura Beth Daws

Ms. Daws is no longer an instructor, as far as I know, so you've already missed out on the best core class that Auburn has to offer. Most people moan and groan their way through Public Speaking, but Ms. Daws helped make this course one of the most enjoyable I've ever taken. The members of the class were stellar as well. Everyone was in class before it began just to socialize with the other people in the class, and it wasn't long before everyone knew each other and the course took on a life of its own. My speeches were pretty simple, but creative, which Daws encouraged. I related myself to a coffee cup, went overtime on a speech about the Alabama constitution thanks to class interest, and tried to persuade people to drink more, not less, coffee. But the crowning achievement was the group project in which we identified a problem on Auburn's campus and sought to solve it. Topics like parking were off-limits, but on-campus transit systems were free game. So my group, affectionately dubbed "The Corner Group" because of our location in the class, chose to speak on Auburn's need for a slip-n-slide/zipline system for on campus transit. We came up with the idea as a half-serious joke, but Ms. Daws challenged us to pursue the idea. And so we spoke, in A-grade form, on the costs, benefits, and awesomeness of a campus in which the concourse was a giant yellow slide and zipline towers dotted the landscape. Instead of showing up in formal attire, like our other classmates (whose presentations were interesting and thoughtful in their own particular idioms), we walked into class dressed in climbing gear or swimwear with towels slung over our shoulders. We presented last, and our classmates thanked us for going last, since our speech was so phenomenal.

2. Science Fiction as Intellectual History, with Dr. Guy Beckwith

Dr. Beckwith is amazing. On my teacher evaluation I wrote that if he taught a religion course, he'd probably convert me to whatever religion he taught. Mix a great professor with a great subject and you have an hour of awesome every meeting. We journeyed through Science Fiction from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to William Gibson's cyberpunk hit Neuromancer, making wonderful stops in between. Beckwith covered an amazing amount of relevant territory, always relating it back to our own experiences. For example, when he lectured on Henry Ford, whose ideas and practices significantly influenced Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, he talked about Ford's idea of mass consumption. Ford gave dedicated workers an extra day for the weekend, Saturday, so they could go into stores and consume goods there, thus driving local economies. We talked about the Frankenstein trope, my name for the idea that science, devoid of ethics and for some authors, religion, will create monsters, whether those monsters are Frankenstein's demon or the atomic bomb, which Walter J. Miller discusses in A Canticle for Liebowitz. The class was filled with a mix of liberal arts nerds and science and engineering geeks, so class discussions were quite interesting, to say the least. If you took the course, you know what I'm talking about.

3. Eastern Central Europe in the 20th Century, Dr. Cathleen Giustino

Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia), Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia (now fragmented into like a million states), Poland, Hungary. Who knows anything about these countries? I didn't going into the course, and when Dr. Giustino asked us to describe our knowledge, I wrote "I think a lot of ethnic cleansing goes on there." But over the course ... of the course I began to appreciate the complexities of that ignored region, the cultural diversity and production, and some of the gruesome parts of that region's 20th century experience. I also was challenged to get rid of my traditional notions of democracy and communism as practiced by the United States and the Soviet Union. Of course, Russia was totally ridiculous, but the U.S. was comparable on that account. I wonder why we mythologize the history, even recent, of the U.S. but are so harshly critical of some of our modern politicians, as if this sort of national-health-care-everyone-gets-a-free-sponge-implant silliness wasn't present in some other form previously. I wrote two papers for this course that contributed to my acceptance at Texas. I wrote on the post-WWII "wild transfers" of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia. After the war, many Germans were forced to deathmarch back to their country, and death tolls ranged from hundreds of thousands to one million. You never hear about that, though. I also wrote about the Plastic People of the Universe, a psychadelic rock band (genre, not adjective), a band that went against the party line in Czechoslovakia in the late 60s/early 70s and ended up provided an infrastructure crucial to circulating anti-government publications. A fun course. Hey, it got me into grad school. And we got to watch No Man's Land, a dark comedy about the ethnic conflicts in Serbia. Right on. Sort of.

4. Europe from the Renaissance to the French Revolution, Dr. Donna Bohanan
This was my first history course that counted towards my major. I took it in the fall of my sophomore year. My first semester at Auburn I didn't have any history courses (I was an EE major for numerous reasons, and despite the jokes I hold nothing against them and their higher starting pay). My second semester I took both World History courses and realized that I wanted to a professor. Bohanan's course sealed the deal. We talk about everything imaginable, from Renaissance activity to the theology of the Reformers (which I was particularly stoked about) and the French Revolution, with the Girondin and Montangnards or however they're spelled. Dr. Bohanan is a great professor too, that demands a lot of her students but also refreshes them at crucial points in the semester, even if it's just her personality. If you're looking for an elective that is a great course, you should take this one. You'll learn some great history and the coursework won't kill you.

5. The Civil Rights Movement, Dr. David Carter
I was mildly interested in the Civil Rights Movement when I took this course, but one of our readings became one of my favorite books of my whole Auburn experience. Dr. Carter won't provide you with answers about race; instead he'll teach you how to ask some of the important questions yourself. If you want a better understanding of the race relations (or lack thereof that we sometimes see), it's probably better to take his course than watch televised events of accidental shootings and violence. I learned about the multi-faceted nature of the movement, from Dr. King's SCLC to the SNCC students that thought he stole the show while doing little community work. Then you see in the late sixties how the movement fragmented into black power, feminism, or pure idealism. The history of the movement is a great way to examine some of the ideas about race that our nation has historically and presently, and may be one of the best ways to appreciate the widely differeing experiences of both whites and blacks, and now Latino/as and other ethnic groups in society, expressing a legitimate concern for everyone.

Honorable Mention
Existentialism, Dr. Bill Davis
Dr. Davis doesn't teach this course anymore, and I don't think I'm much more sure of what existentialism is now than I did before I took it. But I did make a lot of friends which eventually cost me several hours as I would bump into them, and then get coffee and argue about who knows what. It was all very unplanned, and I suppose you could argue that was what the course taught us.